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Notes -
Lol, if only it was that good for everything.
Something I ran into literally right now: I wanted to make letter-sized (8.5x11") slides in powerpoint. The process is:
I have no idea how anyone is supposed to know that the ruler in Powerpoint (but not Word!) is set within the language settings in Windows. Or that you should start at "view" to get formatting options. It feels like they went from "If you don't know something, you shouldn't be afraid to ask for help" to "If our users don't know something, they should be required to ask for our help".
It makes more sense when you realized that "desktop computing and office suites", as a general paradigm, peaked around the year 2000. UI/UX research was still going strong at large companies like Microsoft and IBM, and paying dividends in terms of customer satisfaction (because they still had to compete- if MS shit out complete garbage Lotus 1-2-3 was still a viable alternative).
But the problem is that after that, we never re-wrote anything, and just started stacking complexity upon complexity upon complexity such that nobody actually remembers what the starting point was in the first place. This is the reason why all new frontiers in computing have been "just stack another VM on it", because you're starting from a clean enough state that you can actually make something useful for once.
This is part of the reason people use Macs, because the UX paradigm hasn't changed since 1984. Microsoft has had 3 in that same time- one for the original Windows, one for '95, and one for 8 (tablets)- which is why, except for Windows NT (which is why the best versions of Windows ever released were NT 4 and NT 5/5.1 (usually known as Windows 2000/XP)), everything MS does feels like (and for the most part, is) a regression.
A lot of this is due to massive barriers to entry (this software is actually quite complex, and while some standards are open like MS' OOXML, there are a bunch of quirks to/bugs in MS' renderer that make copying it word-for-word impossible and are, naturally, undisclosed), the lack of any major innovation (AI isn't it, by the way) in the way the software should work because the ways in which we interact with computers has not meaningfully advanced (pixel densities and other interactions in VR aren't there yet though the Vision Pro is a good beta-test for it, AI is not meaningfully going to change this aside from fuzz testing, which companies aren't even going to use anyway because there's no reason for them to compete on UX, and we don't have any neural linking yet), and network effects for "you have to know this software to get a job" mean that it's not possible to meaningfully compete on UX, so any company that is in the position of doing so is not going to spend any money on it themselves, which makes the problem worse.
So all that remains are non-profit organizations trying to drive desktop development forwards in the shadow of the academics that created the computers in the first place, but they've been screwing around bikeshedding a replacement shell for 10+ years now (and... to be fair, they kind of do need to do this, as X Windows is technologically cool but also very crusty and not particularly secure) so I don't think they're going to amount to much.
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